Cloudy with a Chance of Insight: An ISV’s Guide to Customer Usage Data Collection in the Cloud

The right entitlement management service and user management tools can instantly improve your business processes and customer insight by simplifying your billing process, while tracking customer usage, feature usage trends, regional usage, and much more. These features ultimately provide critical data to assist organization-wide decision making.

Publishers of on-premise software have, for many years, experienced the benefits of mining usage data to improve their business. Vendors of SaaS applications, however, are experiencing firsthand, some of the unique challenges of gathering this type of data for their hosted applications. This paper focuses on SaaS growth and the challenges of gathering customer insights—whether on-premise or in the cloud. Also discussed are the types of data that can be useful, and examples that help illustrate the business value of harvesting and analyzing usage. The paper goes further to present SaaS vendors with robust solutions for gathering customer insight.

SaaS and the Cloud are Here to Stay

There is no doubt about it, cloud computing and SaaS are on the rise. Software vendors offering their application software as a service are part of a disruptive cloud-computing trend that has noticeably changed the software marketplace and the way we consume software.

Industry analysts agree. Forrester Research recently reported that SaaS now accounts for a whopping $9 billion share of the roughly $30 billion cloud computing market—representing the largest segment in cloud computing.